The Day the Archives Burned

Schmuck Dynasty's irrelevance boiled over everyone's rage pot shortly before we broke the internet, and we missed a bit of legitimate stories amid a War on Christmas more mythical than Santa Claus. It's a shame because what happened on the evening of December 6th in Franklin County, NC is unforgivable, and completely absent from the instantaneous and non-stop newsfeed of the modern world of journalism.

After a clerk in Franklin County discovered boxes upon boxes of documents dating as far back as 1840, the one government employee actually excited about a mundane government job recognized the wealth of information - and history - locked away in the Franklin County Court House.

The local historical society rallied a team of volunteers to pour through the priceless artifacts. And they were doing just fine until they did exactly what common sense told them to do. They contacted the North Carolina Department of Archives.

The Department of Archives, which is charged with exactly what the department's name suggests, did the exact opposite. After seizing the documents from the group of historians and volunteers, they put the boxes back in the basement for months. Then on December 6th, a Friday after the government had closed for the weekend, the Department of Archives with police in tow, set each and every box of history ablaze.

A month later, not a single explanation has been offered, which has led the few who bothered to report on the burning to speculate that the material may have contained sensitive, Civil War era material that could potentially wag a finger and some of the South's more prominent families, which would make the lost documents ever more intriguing. And then Emperor Nero burned the Library of Alexandria.